Monday, October 27, 2014

Saving up for something special can be very difficult
especially when you’re a child with limited options for making money. But, in The Girl and the Bicycle by
Mark Pett our heroine has the moxie and perseverance to do just that.

While out walking
with her little brother one day, she sees the best green bicycle in the
whole-wide-world sitting in a store window.
She races home to see what she has in her piggy bank and quickly starts
looking for ways to generate the cash she needs to purchase her dream. She searches high and low, from under couch
cushions and in pant pockets, running a lemonade stand, to raking leaves for a
neighbour. Our enterprising protagonist
won’t be daunted.

The one neighbor who initially employs her raking leaves turns
into a seemingly regular gig over several months and helping with a multitude of
chores allows the young girl to save up enough money for her bike.

Eventually, when girl has the money she dashes back to the
bike shop only to discover the bike has been sold. Overcoming her disappointment, she decides to
buy her little brother a tricycle instead.
On the way home, the kindly neighbor who the girl has been working for gives
her a wonderful surprise: the green bicycle is waiting for her in her yard.

A happily-ever-after story if there ever was one.

The book has a very old-fashion feel to it with sepia
colouring throughout, and retro-looking clothes and hairstyles for the children, plus the fact the girl is doing chores to earn money.

Being a wordless book, the illustrations do all the work and
they are a treat to read through. The
illustration style is fairly simplistic with few details to distract from the
characters and their actions. A couple
of pages do include a few bits of information about the neighbour . Here we see objects that allude to her dreams
of flying. Watch for a red airplane, the
only other coloured object (besides the bike) in the book.

Monday, October 20, 2014

This is an oversized
board book that presents an initial image that can be manipulated with a few
turns of various flaps to become an animal.
For example, a black pot (think caldron) over a fire bubbles as it cooks
a stew. By swinging the flap over, the pot becomes the top part of the head of
a raccoon with a bandit face peering out at us.
Two pieces of wood (part of the fire) turn up and the raccoon has arms
and paws. The accompanying text on the preceding
page states’ POT’ with several rhyming lines that almost sound like a spell, playing into
the idea of a magical transformation that ends with our RACCOON friend appearing. (See the cover above.)

The text itself may be a little challenging for the youngest
children but the rotating flaps will keep them engaged. The bright colours and fairly simple, stylized
illustrations have an unassuming charm that is appealing. The first and last words are bold and easily
read by earlier readers with the other text read by an older reader. Great for playing a game of prediction, “Presto
change-o! What will this become?”

This may be a book to get kids to model their own art work,
coming up with two different things and figuring out how to get one object to transform
into the other with just a few flaps.

The compositions are fairly straight forward. Typically the child is centred in the photo with
their toys (or toy, as the case may be) splayed out around them. The preceding page offers their first name,
age and the country they live in.
Sometimes there are lots of objects, sometimes only one. It’s fascinating to see what is deemed a ‘toy’. The ones you’d expect are there: animal stuffies, all manner of vehicles, dolls
and Barbies, a myriad of plastic figures and animals, a few bikes, a few games
(both board and video).

But the picture with
Maudy (3, from Zambia) standing in front of a few dozen pairs of sunglasses is
definitely unusual. Apparently, a box of
sunglasses fell from a passing truck and became toys, the only toys in this
village. They like to play pretend
market. Or there’s Callum, 4 from Alaska, standing with a couple of shovels and
sleds in a wintery landscape that also speaks to a very specific kind of
interest in a particular kind of environment.

A few children seemed keen on guns (a little
scary), and I found only three photos where books were included (a little
distressing).

You do see what you would expect to in terms of differences
between affluent and poor families (more and less, literally). But the introduction offers a couple of
interesting perspectives about this observation:

“The fewer toys a child had the less possessive he or she was
about them. Galimberti describes having
to spend several hours winning the trust of Western children before they would
consent to let him touch their planes, cars, or dolls. ‘In poorer countries, they don’t care as
much. They play in a different way,
running around, sharing one ball between them all.’ … Likewise, children who
enjoy a free-roaming existence in the countryside seemed to place less value on
their toys than children living in busy cities, confined and isolated. ‘City children mostly stay inside, and mostly
play alone, ’he says. ‘They tend to have
a lot more toys and to be a lot more possessive.’”

The short introduction is well worth reading.

Using this book with Material World by Peter
Menzel and/or Much Lovedby Mark Nixon would make an interesting threesome. Though all three don’t have to be used
together, pairing at least two of them offers a classroom teacher a visual way
to explore material culture on a level that kids could easily relate to. Looking at their toys and finding out what
they mean to them and then looking at how other children live might make the
conversation about quality of life more comprehensible.

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About Me

I am the reference coordinator at The Doucette Library of Teaching Resources, a curriculum library in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary.
I love connecting education students and teachers with engaging and exciting resources for classroom teaching. I believe that resources that get me excited (or those that get you excited) are the ones with the best potential to get kids interested in learning about - well, everything. Finding those books that connect to the real world are the ones I enjoy promoting the most.